By Lincoln Archer

June 19, News.com.au

A RACIST "joke" has Barack Obama supporters fuming and Republicans cringing, as bizarre claims of sex and drugs were allowed centre stage on the US presidential campaign trail today.

A man who used YouTube to claim he took drugs and performed oral sex on Senator Obama in 1999 was given free rein at the US National Press Club, prompting a two-hour press conference that soon descended into farce.

Appearing with his kilt-wearing lawyer - who said the attire was necessary to accommodate his amply proportioned genitalia - Larry Sinclair presented himself for a grilling over his sensational claims.

"I asked him to wear a suit and tie," Mr Sinclair said of his attorney, according to the Huffington Post's bemused correspondent. He offered little evidence of his claims, but promised some in the future.

He also promised to take a police lie detector test to prove himself. He may get the chance sooner than he thought - later reports said Mr Sinclair was arrested after the press conference, which might be remembered as the low point in the toxic margins of this campaign.

A post on Politico revealed Mr Sinclair has an extensive criminal history.

Racist badge

Meanwhile in Texas, the man behind a racist badge targeting Senator Obama, which was sold at a Republican party convention, apologised today but said he was just trying to be funny.

A badge bearing the words: "If Obama is President... will we still call it The White House?" was sold at a stall at the Texas Republican party's get-together over the weekend.

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photo: Revealed ... the original Dallas Morning News post showing the badge / Web grab/News.com.au

May 15, News.com.au

A JEALOUS husband who accused his wife of having an affair with a workmate took the ultimate online revenge - by placing her for sale on eBay.
The British man evicted his wife from their marital home, then advertised her on the internet site for just over $1m.

On the site Paul Osborn, 44, offers up wife Sharon saying he's putting his “cheating, lying, adulterous slag of a wife” to the highest bidder.

The site has been inundated with enquiries with users forwarding the link worldwide.

But Sharon, 43, denies an affair and British police are now investigating Paul for harassment.

Traffic inspector Paul heard rumours in March that railways manager Sharon, his wife of 24 years, was having an affair with a man at work.

He told Britain's The Sun newspaper: “I started checking her emails and I realised the rumours were true. They had been discussing their sex life together and making plans for the future.

“I was absolutely destroyed. I gathered all her stuff in bags and dumped it in the drive.”

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photo: For sale ... a screen grab from The Sun newspaper of a wife for sale on eBay

By Joe Bavier

April 24, Reuters

KINSHASA - Police in Congo have arrested 13 suspected sorcerers accused of using black magic to steal or shrink men's penises after a wave of panic and attempted lynchings triggered by the alleged witchcraft.

Reports of so-called penis snatching are not uncommon in West Africa, where belief in traditional religions and witchcraft remains widespread, and where ritual killings to obtain blood or body parts still occur.

Rumors of penis theft began circulating last week in Kinshasa, Democratic Republic of Congo's sprawling capital of some 8 million inhabitants. They quickly dominated radio call-in shows, with listeners advised to beware of fellow passengers in communal taxis wearing gold rings.

Purported victims, 14 of whom were also detained by police, claimed that sorcerers simply touched them to make their genitals shrink or disappear, in what some residents said was an attempt to extort cash with the promise of a cure.

"You just have to be accused of that, and people come after you. We've had a number of attempted lynchings. ... You see them covered in marks after being beaten," Kinshasa's police chief, Jean-Dieudonne Oleko, told Reuters on Tuesday.

Police arrested the accused sorcerers and their victims in an effort to avoid the sort of bloodshed seen in Ghana a decade ago, when 12 suspected penis snatchers were beaten to death by angry mobs. The 27 men have since been released.

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photo by Getty Images

By Jake Stump
Daily Mail Capitol Reporter

April 12, DailyMail

One St. Albans man would rather burn ink into his skin than buy another gallon of gas for his 1992 Subaru Loyale.

So he's come up with an artistic approach to protest the sky-high price of fuel.

James Burns is auctioning off advertising space on his neck and the back of his head on eBay.

At the starting bid of $99, Burns says he'll tattoo a company logo, Web site or anything at the winner's request as long as it doesn't contain profanity.

Burns, 29, plans to put the money toward a more fuel-friendly set of wheels, a QLINK Legend motorcycle that runs on 80 miles to the gallon.

"Gas prices are hurting everyone," said Burns, who's married with four children, ages 9 to 12. "They're sticking it to me. I've got kids at home and I'm trying to do everything I can. With the way gas is, we've had to cut back on everything."

Burns' full-time job as a chemical operator in Nitro doesn't bring home enough bacon for him and his family. He's posted ads offering services for odd jobs on Craigslist, to no avail.

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photo: At the starting bid of $99, James Burns says he’ll tattoo a company logo, Web site or anything at the winner’s request as long as it doesn’t contain profanity (Courtesy photo)

By Stefan Anitei, Science Editor

April 3, Softpedia

Human habits are extremely diverse worldwide. But some really leave you stunned. And while we are searching for remote galaxies and worlds in the sky, some things seem to belong to other worlds.

You can imagine the shock of Shamsunnahar Hena, a gynecologist in a Bangladesh hospital, when her pregnant patient said she had been eating half a kilogram (1.1 pounds) of soil every day since she got pregnant.

An increasing number of pregnant woman in Bangladeshi Sylhet
region, more famous for its tea plantations, are consuming charred soil, which according to the local tradition, it boosts their appetite and health, translated into the delivery of a healthy child. But soil eating is a very dangerous issue (imagine that the anthrax bacteria and others resist for years in the soil) and that soil is just scorched.

"Often we get pregnant women complaining of dysentery and some other problems, but in most cases they are found guilty of eating soil," Hena told Reuters.

The habit is also fueled by many poor and jobless people, who collect and burn mud to sell it at up to 120 taka ($ 1.7) per kg ($ 0.77 per pound).
"Normally they eat a piece or two in a day, but recently I got a patient who confessed to eating half a kilogram of soil every day during her pregnancy period," said Hena, the chief gynecologist in Sylhet's Osmani Medical College.

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photo by softpedia

By Tim Dornin

March 18, News.com.au

A MAN, who took the name of a famous rock star to steal millions of dollars from finance companies, has been jailed for 16 years.

Romeo Pacifico, who changed his name to Richard Sambora, the same as the famed Bon Jovi guitarist, managed to obtain cash loans totalling $25 million.

The Adelaide man used the money to prop up his failing business and to fund a lavish lifestyle including the purchase of luxury homes and cars.

Over a four-year period from about 1998 to 2002, he engaged in an exercise of "robbing Peter to pay Paul", according to South Australian District Court Judge Wayne Chivell.

The judge said Pacifico was involved in string of fraud-related offences where he obtained money from finance companies supposedly for business expenses.

Some of the cash he used to pay off previous loans but Judge Chivell said of the $25,639,133 he obtained, the victims actually lost a total of more than $8 million.

The judge described the offending as premeditated, deliberate and calculated.

"It was stealing and stealing on a grand scale," he said.

Pacifico, 44, eventually pleaded guilty to 19 charges, most involving forged tax and bank statements and also asked the court to take into account another 17 offences.

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photo: Jailed ... Romeo Pacifico outside an Adelaide court in 2006 / Sam Mooy

March 12, Reuters

HELSINKI - A Finnish library-goer apparently thought 'better late than never' and quietly returned a book on loan for more than 100 years to a library in Vantaa, in southern Finland.

The library had long since lost track of the loan but welcomed back to its collections the bound copy of a 1902 volume of Vartija, an active religious monthly periodical at the time.

"We are unclear when exactly it was borrowed and who returned it. There weren't any documents with it," librarian Minna Saastamoinen told Reuters.

"There is an old note attached to the book which says there is a fine of 10 pennies a week for late returns," she added.

The library sticker inside the cover, and the old-fashioned handwriting on it, showed the book was last officially loaned out at the beginning of the last century, she said.

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photo: A woman stands among the bookshelves in the main reading room of The New York Public Library, December 14, 2004 (REUTERS/Mike Segar)

By MATTHEW HICKLEY and ALLAN HALL

March 04, DailyMail.co.uk

Eight British Commandos have been flown home in disgrace for stripping naked and engaging in appalling behaviour in a Norwegian bar during an Arctic training exercise.

The men disgusted onlookers in the town of Harstad with a drunken game of "naked bar".

After whipping off their clothes, they urinated on each other - splashing other customers and furniture - before slurring insults and abuse.

Furious senior officers ordered the soldiers, from the Army's 59 Independent Commando Squadron Royal Engineers, back home to face disciplinary action.

"This is taken extremely seriously," a Ministry of Defence official said.

The shameful case has been widely covered by the Norwegian media.

They highlighted local people complaining that they were fed up with yobbish behaviour by British troops, whom they accused of displaying a "nasty edge" compared with soldiers from other countries.

The incident happened on Wednesday night, after the eight soldiers had been honing their Arctic warfare skills alongside Royal Marines.

They were part of Exercise Octans, an annual exercise involving thousands of personnel from more than a dozen Nato countries.

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photo: Naked ambition: The soldiers stripped off in a Norwegian bar and reportedly urinated on locals, each other and all over the furniture (DailyMail)

By Sandeep Sahu
Bhubaneswar

Feb 26, BBC News

Some 3,000 villagers have attended an elaborate Hindu wedding ceremony in eastern India for two monkeys.

The "bride" was dressed in a five-metre long sari and decked in flowers. The ceremony took place last Thursday in Ghanteswara village in Orissa state.

The guests were served a feast of rice, lentils, vegetables, fish and sweets.

Monkeys are revered idols in Hindu mythology. But the couples that took in and "married" off the two monkeys in Orissa say they love them as pets.

The monkey marriage took place some 200km (125 miles) from the Orissa state capital, Bhubaneswar.

The "groom", a three-year-old male monkey named Manu, was taken by procession to a temple in the company of hundreds of bemused onlookers, accompanied by loud music, dancing and fireworks.

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photo: Thousands of villagers attended the marriage (BBC News)

By staff writers

Feb 6, news.com.au

A GERMAN police officer has emerged as the hero who saved baby Onur, the child photographed being thrown four stories from a burning building in Germany yesterday.

The officer caught nine-month-old Onur in his arms when she was thrown from the building by her desperate family.

Officials say the police officer was injured and needed hospital treatment after falling to the ground when he caught the child.

The photograph of Onur being thrown from the building shocked the world. Onur has been reunited with her father and is unhurt.

Nine people, including five children, were killed in the blaze at the building in Ludwigshafen in southwestern Germany.

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photo: Split-second decision ... Onur is thrown from the burning building (AFP)

Raymond Jacobs, 82, worked to prove he was in original picture

Jan 4, MSNBC

REDDING, Calif. - Raymond Jacobs, believed to be the last surviving member of the group of Marines photographed during the original U.S. flag-raising on Iwo Jima during World War II, has died at age 82.

Jacobs died Jan. 29 of natural causes at a Redding hospital, his daughter, Nancy Jacobs, told The Associated Press.

Jacobs had spent his later years working to prove that he was the radio operator photographed looking up at an American flag as it was being raised by other Marines on Mount Suribachi on Feb. 23, 1945.

Newspaper accounts from the time show he was on the mountain during the initial raising of a smaller American flag, though he had returned to his unit by the time the more famous AP photograph was taken of a second flag-raising later the same day.

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photo: Raymond Jacobs points to himself at Iwo Jima during a 2005 interview (AP)

By Clementine Cuneo

Jan 30, news.com.au

THIS little boy's face was horribly scarred by the family dog - but his mother yesterday vowed to keep the pet, blaming the attack on her son.

Two-year-old Noah Newbold is lucky to have the sight in his left eye after being mauled by his family's 50kg mastiff-staffordshire cross.

Deep cuts and scratches cover the left side of his face.

But yesterday the toddler's mother, Alicia Cottier, said she was keeping the dog despite the attack because it had been provoked by her son pulling the dog's ears.

"People are telling me I should shoot the dog, and as much as I love my son to death, I believe Noah was annoying her. I love the dog and she's part of the family," Ms Cottier said.

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photo: No hard feelings ... Noah says he still loves his dog Cassey / Liam Driver

Commentary by Martin Gayford

Jan 17, Bloomberg

A few notes scribbled in the margin of a manuscript found in Heidelberg, Germany, have closed down a small scholarly industry. Now we know, almost definitely, the identity of the ``Mona Lisa.''

She is Lisa di Antonmaria Gherardini, wife of Francesco del Giocondo and, at the time that Leonardo encountered her, a 20- something Florentine mother of three.

In October 1503, Agostino Vespucci, a friend of the artist, jotted in his copy of Cicero's letters the fact that Leonardo was currently working on three pictures. One was a portrait of Lisa del Giocondo. That seems to settle the question of the sitter's name. Lovers of mystery will be pleased to learn that it doesn't settle all the puzzles of this famously enigmatic picture.

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photo: This is a handout photo of Leonardo da Vinci's 'Mona Lisa.' Source: Louvre via Bloomberg News

Reporting by Gavin Jones; editing by Keith Weir

Jan 16, Reuters

ROME - Recording secret videos of sex with your partner is not illegal, Italy's supreme court has ruled.

Rome's highest appeals acquitted a 49-year-old man who, unbeknown to his girlfriend, had recorded and kept films of them having sex.

It overruled two previous verdicts which had given him a four-month jail sentence.

The woman had agreed to the man using a video camera to project live images of them having sex on to the bedroom wall, but did not know he was recording the action.

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photo: A camera operator films a piece of video art in Moscow February 28, 2007. REUTERS/Thomas Peter

Posted by Cory Doctorow

(Jan 7, boingboing)

Marilyn sez, "A family doing chores in their recently purchased suburban house in South Carolina discovered a hidden room behind a bookcase, which revealed the truth about their house: it was permeated with toxic black mold."

The note said "You Found It!"

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photo: Inside the room was a hand-written note.